This is pretty much how last week went: crashing hard after surfing through the dullness of reality.
The picture pretty much sums up the past week that was, in that there wasn't much of newness to it, just a leveling off from the plateau of freshness into the mesa of staleness.
The only thing of note that I was consistently working on, besides finally getting to the last stage of publishing the print version of my novella, which was fraught with serious examples of self-inflicted obtuseness that created extra work that didn't need to happen, was my post fantasy chapter outline/bullet points for my recently completed series.
One of my little quirks that will sometimes raise its fugly head is that I can be extremely....focused on certain peripheral items that are related to the original project that I would be working on. This chapter outline/synopsis is one such item.
This soon to be 150+ page monstrosity allowed me to go into further detail with my note taking, in that allowed me to properly plan out how certain chapters should be rewritten and/or revitalized. For example, some time during the second volume of the series, I decided to refocus on how I wrote chapters. Instead of writing a chapter with competing plotlines between two main characters (that ultimately became three) that would occasionally meet up throughout the series, I decided it would be easier to alternate chapters between each of the main characters.
This made things so much easier for me to handle, as each character would have their own chapter devoted to their particular plot line, plus all of the various tangents within that plotline, with the occasional crossover to the other plotlines, until the final three chapters.
So this is how I've been keeping myself occupied in the morning/afternoon/evening: churning out what I will predict to be 105+ pages of pure, unadulterated, board certified doctor scribble. And I do mean doctor scribble. My printing is bad to begin with, and my note taking has ramped up the scribble to the point of being undecipherable, like a court reporter's note taking.
Like it's now turned into a hybrid mix of printing/cursive handwriting, complete with words that are supposed to be, say seven letters long for example, being chopped down to maybe four, with no vowels and letters that could masquerade for six others (yes, my scribble is just. that. bad.). My scribble is what doctors should aspire to and what pharmacy techs should loudly curse to the bowels of hell over.
So....that's been my basic to-do list for the past couple of months, but up until last week, I was able to do other things around it so that I would break up the monotony of a dreaded, but highly necessary addition to the laborious proper editing of this series.
Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Absolutely....in 2026, after I publish one final re-re-re-write of a previously published novella that I was severely disappointed with mere days after it went live.
Have a fantastic start to your month of September!
